Honest 1 Auto Care complaints

Company states; When the Customer brought the vehicle in for the repairs that were completed on Jan 10, they wanted to have the Oil Leaks look at. We found excessive oil leaks on the Engine coming out of the Valve Cover Gaskets, Oil Pan Gasket and the Intake Manifold Gasket. The Intake Manifold Gasket seemed to be the most excessive oil leaks - so the customer wanted to start by having us fix the Intake Manifold Gasket that was leaking at that time (Repair Order 73924). We completed the Repairs on Jan 10, 2024 and the Customer picked it up on Jan 10, 2024. After the Customer picked up the Vehicle, they came back after 5-10 minutes and said that the Vehicle is not running correctly and there is a loud tapping sound coming from the Engine and there is a noticeable loss of power when trying to accelerate. We brought the Vehicle back into our shop and inspected the Vehicle. Our Technician verified that a Valve Lifter had collapsed on Cylinder #4 - which is why there is now a tapping noise. We explained to the Customer that there is no possible way that the repairs that we performed (fixing an Oil Leak) can cause a Lifter to collapse. Lifters in this Engine is not accessible and you cannot even physically see them unless you pull the Cylinder Heads off of the Engine - this requires about 5 hours of labor. The Engine Oil Level was full, and it is physically impossible to make the Valve Lifter collapse from the work that we performed on the Vehicle. We explained to the Customer that it is unfortunate that the Lifter had collapsed on Cylinder #4 and it is probably more due to wear and tear on the Vehicle - which had over 180K miles on it. The Vehicle is a 2008 Chevy Impala with a 5.3 liter engine. If you research or Google "2008 Chevrolet Impala 5.3 Lifter Problem" you will find that this a very common problem on this engine. We realized that the Customer just purchased the Vehicle within a couple months but the reality is the Vehicle is a 2008 - 16 years old with over 180K miles on it. Lifters are known to go bad on this Vehicle and it is a common problem on this Vehicle. The Customer then told us that they have an after-market 3rd party Warranty that they purchased when buying this Vehicle and wanted us to see if the Warranty Company (PAP) will help with the Repairs for the Lifters. The 3rd Party Warranty Company - PROTECTIVE ACTIVE PROTECTION (PAP) verified that Lifters are a covered item in their warranty. However, before they can approved the repairs, PAP wanted us to pull the Cylinder Head off and prove to them that the Lifter on cylinder #4 had failed. Our Technician pulled the rear Cylinder Head off and found the Lifter on the #4 Cylinder that had collapsed. PAP then sent an Inspector out to our shop to take pictures and verify the fault with the Lifter that failed on #4 Cylinder. At that time, when the Inspector was out, there was no reason to believe that there were other problems with the bottom of the Engine. The Inspector agreed that the Lifter failing is a common problem on this engine and recommend that we replace not just the #4 Lifter but ALL the Lifters on the engine. At this time, both our Technician and the Inspector from the PAP warranty company had no reason or no way of knowing that there was additional damage done on the bottom of the Cylinder #4. After the PAP warranty approved the Repairs (Repair Order 73961) we proceed and completed the Lifter Replacement on the engine. After completing the Lifter Replacement - the Lifter/Tapping noise was no longer there - but the engine was still misfiring on Cylinder #4. We performed a compression and a Leak-Down test to verify that there is a problem on the Bottom-End of the Engine. This was most likely caused when the Lifter collapsed on cylinder #4. As previously mentioned there is no way of verifying that the bottom end of the cylinder was damaged when the Lifter failed on cylinder #4. Both our Technician and the Inspector from the Warranty company verified that there was no visible damage on Cylinder #4 - which is why we proceeded with the Lifter Replacement repairs. The Warranty company would NEVER have approved a repair for a replacement Engine knowing that at this time that the only visible damage we could see was a collapsed Lifter on cylinder #4. There was no way of knowing that cylinder #4 was damaged when we had just the cylinder head off and saw that the Lifter had collapsed. The proper repair was performed on the Vehicle at that time, and the only way of knowing that #4 cylinder was damaged was to put new Lifters and re-assemble the top of the engine and re-start the Vehicle like we did. We cannot explain the exact cause of the failure on bottom of cylinder #4 - but we went after the clear visibly damaged part (Lifter) on cylinder #4. Knowing that the Vehicle has over 180K miles on it and had excessive Oil Leaks when it came into our shop - most likely failure is due to wear and tear on the Engine.

Read More

Read More